It started snowing

It started snowing shortly after 10 a.m.
The man in the wheelhouse of the fishing boat cursed. He'd heard the forecast, but hoped they might make the Swedish coast before the storm hit. If he hadn´t been held up at Hiddensee the night before, he'd have been within sight of Ystad by now and could have changed course a few degrees eastwards. As it was, there will still 7 nautical miles to go and if the snow started coming down heavily, he'd be forced to heave to and wait until visibility improved.
He cursed again. It doesn't pay to be mean,he thought. I should have done what I'd meant to do last autumn, and bought a new radar. My old Decca can't be relied on any more. I should have got one of those new American models, but I was too mean. I didn't trust them not to cheat me.
He found hard it to grasp that there was no longer a country called East Germany, that a whole nation state had ceased to exist. History had tidied up its old borders overnight.
Now there was just Germany, and nobody really knew what was going to happen when the two formerly separate peoples tried to work together. At first, when the Berlin Wall came down, he had felt uneasy. Would the enormous changes mean the carpet would be pulled from under his feet? His east German partners had reassured him. Nothing would change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, this upheaval might even create new opportunities.
From the book 'The dogs of Riga' by Henning Mankell and translated by Laurie Thompson

On one occasion

On one occasion when the Noble Order the Knights, from whom the senators were chosen, complained of the severity of his laws against bachelors, he summoned the entire order into the Market Place for a lecture. When he had them assembled there he divided them up into two groups, the married and the unmarried. The unmarried were a very much larger group than the married and he addressed separate speeches to each group, He worked himself up into a great passion with the unmarried, calling the beasts and brigands and, by a queer figure of speech, murderers of their posterity. By this time Augustus was an old man with all the petulance and crankiness of an old man who has been at the head odd affairs all his life. He asked them, had they an hallucination that they were Vestal Virgins ? At lest Vestal Virgins slept alone, which was more than they did. Would they, pray, explain why instead of sharing their beds with decent women of their own class and begetting healthy children, they squandered all their virile energy on greasy slaves-girls and nasty Asiatic-Greek prostitutes? And if he were to believe what he heard , the partner of their nightly bed-play was more often one of those creatures of loathsome profession whom he would not even name, lest the admission of their existence in the City should he construed as a condonation of it. If he had his way a man who shirked his social obligations and at the same time lived a life of sexual debauch should be subject to the same dreadful penalties as a Vestal who forgets her vows- to be buried alive.
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves

Find what you love and do it

Find what you love and do it. That’s what it boils down to. I admit I didn’t always love teaching. I was out of my depth. You’re on your own in the classroom, one man or woman facing five classes every day, five classes of teenagers. One unit of energy against one hundred and seventy-five ticking bombs, and you have to find ways of saving your own life. They may like you, they may even love you, but they are young and it is the business of the young to push the old off the planet. I know I’m exaggerating but it’s like a boxer going into the ring or a bullfighter into the arena. You can’t be knocked out or gored and that’s the end of your teaching career. But if you hang on you learn the tricks. It’s hard but you have to make yourself comfortable in the classroom. You have to be selfish. The airlines tell you if oxygen fails you are to put on your mask first, even if your instinct is to save the child.
The classroom is a place of high drama. You’ll never know what you’ve done to, or for, the hundreds coming and going. You see them leaving the classroom: dreamy, flat, sneering, admiring, smiling, puzzled. After a few years you develop antennae. You can tell when you’ve reached them or alienated them. It’s chemistry. It’s psychology. It’s animal instinct. You are with the kids and , as long as you want to be a teacher, there’s no escape. Don’t expect help from the people who’ve escaped the classroom, the higher-ups. They’re busy going to lunch and thinking higher thoughts. It’s you and the kids. So there’s the bell. See you later. Find what you love and do it.
From the book ‘Teacher Man’ by Frank Mc Court